"On yours, sir."
"Mine!" Vallery was incredulous. "I didn't tell him to lock you up!"
"You never told him not to," said Ralston evenly.
Vallery winced: the oversight, the lack of consideration was his, and that hurt badly.
"Where's your night Action Station?" he asked sharply.
"Port tubes, sir."
That, Vallery realised, explained why only the starboard crew had been closed up.
"And why-why have you been left here during Action Stations?
Don't you know it's forbidden, against all regulations?"
"Yes, sir." Again the hint of the wintry smile. "I know.
But does the Master-At-Arms know?" He paused a second, smiled again. "Or maybe he just forgot," he suggested.
"Hartley!" Vallery was on balance again, his tone level and grim. "The Master-At-Arms here, immediately: see that he brings his keys!" He broke into a harsh bout of coughing, spat some blood into the towel, looked at Ralston again.
"I'm sorry about this, my boy," he said slowly. "Genuinely sorry."
"How's the tanker?" Ralston asked softly.
"What?
What did you say?" Vallery was unprepared for the sudden switch. "What tanker?"
"The one that was damaged this morning, sir."
"Still with us." Vallery was puzzled. "Still with us, but low in the water.
Any special reason for asking?"
"Just interested, sir." The smile was wry, but this time it was a smile. "You see------"
He stopped abruptly as a deep, muffled roar crashed through the silent night, the pressure blast listing the Ulysses sharply to starboard.
Vallery lurched, staggered and would have fallen but for Petersen's sudden arm.
He braced himself against the righting roll, looked at Nicholls in sudden dismay.
The sound was all too familiar.
Nicholls gazed back at him, sorry to his heart for this fresh burden for a dying man, and nodded slowly, in reluctant agreement with the unspoken thought in Vallery's eyes.
"Afraid you're right, sir.
Torpedo.
Somebody's stopped a packet."
"Do you hear there!" The capstan flat speaker was hurried, intense, unnaturally loud in the aftermath of silence. "Do you hear there!
Captain on the bridge: urgent.
Captain on the bridge: urgent. Captain on the bridge: urgent.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
FRIDAY EVENING
BENT ALMOST double, Captain Vallery clutched the handrail of the port ladder leading up to the fo'c'sle deck.
Desperately, he tried to look out over the darkened water, but he could see nothing.
A mist, a dark and swirling and roaring mist flecked with blood, a mist shot through with dazzling light swam before his eyes and he was blind.
His breath came in great whoopings gasps that racked his tortured lungs: his lower ribs were clamped in giant pincers, pincers that were surely crushing him.
That stumbling, lurching run from the forepeak, he dimly realised, had all but killed him.
Close, too damn' close, he thought. I must be more careful In future.... Slowly his vision cleared, but the brilliant light remained.
Heavens above, Vallery thought, a blind man could have seen all there was to see here.
For there was nothing to be seen but the tenebrous silhouette, so faint as to be almost imagined, of a tanker deep, deep in the water-and a great column of flame, hundreds of feet in height, streaking upwards from the heart of the dense mushroom of smoke that obscured the bows of the torpedoed ship.
Even at the distance of half a mile, the roaring of the flames was almost intolerable.
Vallery watched appalled.
Behind him he could hear Nicholls swearing, softly, bitterly, continuously.
Vallery felt Petersen's hand on his arm.
"Does the Captain wish to go up to the bridge?"
"In a moment, Petersen, in a moment.
Just hang on."
His mind was functioning again, his eyes, conditioned by forty years' training, automatically sweeping the horizon.
Funny, he thought, you can hardly see the tanker-the Vytura, it must be-she's shielded by that thick pall of smoke, probably; but the other ships in the convoy, white, ghost-like, sharply etched against the indigo blue of the sky, were bathed in that deadly glare. Even the stars had died.